Orion
May 2010

Orion
May 2009

Harcourt
April 2008

Mariner Books
April 2009

The Best Books of 2008

“A time-traveling Virgil meets the young wife he tosses off in a few lines in The Aeneid, and gasps, ‘I thought you were a blonde.’ Le Guin’s wit and scholarship burnish this beautiful, rewarding and unjustly overlooked novel, for which she retooled her grasp of Latin. A believable immersion into an ancient world and the antique virtues of loyalty and grace.” — Karen Long, Book Editor, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Sunday, December 14, 2008. [complete article]

Online Reading

Audiofile of UKL's Lavinia reading at the Corvallis-Benton County Library MP3 [24Mb]

Reviews

Review
12 March 2010

“One of the joys of Lavinia, though, is that Le Guin resists the obvious way to rectify this under-writing. ‘I am not the feminine voice you may have expected,’ Lavinia warns us. ‘Resentment is not what drives me to write my story.’”

IO9
1 November 2009

Lavinia “is one of the most eloquent, profound and moving novels I have ever read and it should have won every major literary award out there.” [complete review]

The Independent
8 September 2009

“With this characteristically graceful retelling
of the final stages of Virgil’s Aeneid, one of the
master fabulists of our time crowns a great
career. A luminous novel that should appeal
across genres and generations.”

"The Hit List"

The Subtle Knife
1 August 2009

“...through the elusive voice that speaks here, shifting and uncoiling like a thread of smoke in still air, Le Guin addresses a wide range of issues — the use of power, the differences (as always!) between men and women, the meaning of war, cruelty and violence; and the nature of the creative and artistic process of storytelling and mythmaking itself.”
[complete review]

Times On Line
28 June 2009
(Excerpt)

“...ranging through historical, political and
spiritual arenas, across centuries, through dreams
and poems and geographical fact... This is a
work of passion, written with cool expertise: a
cracker.” [complete review]

The Australian
5 July 2009
(Excerpt)

“Le Guin cleverly and playfully... asserts
Lavinia as a real
person in her own right, while at the same time
leaving her subject to her immutable role in The
Aeneid. The contrast is intriguing, and adds
a surprising and interesting depth to what
would in any event have been an exceedingly
well-told tale.”

The Telegraph
21 June 2009
(Excerpt)

The Guardian
14 June 2009
(Excerpt)

“She is a social novelist in the best sense of the term [...] her ultimate concern is with the real world. In this novel, Virgil’s imaginary Italy allows her a manipulatory freedom which a more realistic method would not.” [complete review]

Tobias Hill
The Guardian

Times Literary Supplement
May 22, 2009
(Excerpts)

...Ursula Le Guin’s vivid novel gives Lavinia a voice, without any serious pretence that the experience of a princess of the Bronze Age can be recalled. ... The world she describes in tender detail is a pastoral utopia, sufficiently alien from modern values to catch the interest of an author who has always chosen to examine the workings of contemporary society by imagining something wholly different....

...The most haunting passages of the novel imagine Lavinia meeting the shade of Virgil at the sacred shrine of Albunea, where spirits communicate with the living. These encounters are necessarily perplexing, for Lavinia knows that she has no life outside Virgil’s poem.... Virgil is brought to acknowledge that he has not done justice to the self-possessed, dark young woman who stands before him: “I thought you were a blonde!” Here Le Guin makes her authority felt, insisting on a different kind of reality.... But this is not a matter of Le Guin affirming a superior understanding. Virgil’s dignity and stature are given their full weight, and a sense of his sadness suffuses the novel....

...Lavinia’s enduring vitality lies in her love for her flawed and courageous husband, who represents a society with ‘certain homely but delicate values, such as ... loyalty, modesty, and responsibility.’ Le Guin has her own modesty, and would not claim to have superseded Virgil’s achievement. Her novel ... is a moving testament to the conversations that great writers sustain through the centuries.

Death Ray Magazine

Los Angeles Times CalendarLive.com

“Everywhere Le Guin catches the rhythms of the great epic, echoes them, riffs. In a way, this is a jazzy book, playing in odd syncopation with a massive canonical work... I found myself delighted, even stunned, by the freshness of Le Guin’s prose...”

Portland Oregonian

“Everyone could use a forest of Albunea, a place where dreams, ghosts, owls, oracles and ancestors offer hints about your fate and advice about difficult decisions. In Lavinia, Ursula K. Le Guin’s brilliant new novel, a great deal is illuminated in Albunea, not least of which is the true character of Lavinia....”

Booklist

“Fantasist and SF writer Le Guin turns her attention and her considerable
talent to fleshing out a secondary character mentioned briefly in
Virgil’s masterpiece, The Aeneid....The compulsively
readable Le Guin earns kudos for fashioning a winning combination of
history and mythology featuring an
unlikely heroine imaginatively plucked from literary obscurity.”

Library Journal Starred Review

Library Journal’s starred review calls Lavinia “Le Guin’s brilliant reimagining of the last six books of
Virgil’s epic poem.” The reviewer says “...this beautiful and moving novel is a love offering to one of the
world’s great poets...” “Highly recommended.”

— Library Journal
1 March 2008

Kirkus Starred Review

“Le Guin has
researched this ancient world assiduously, and her measured, understated
prose captures with equal skill the permutations of established ritual
and ceremony and the sensations of the battlefield.... Arguably her best novel, and an altogether worthy companion volume to
one of the Western world’s greatest stories.”

— Kirkus Reviews
15 February 2008

Publishers Weekly Starred Review

“Le Guin is famous for creating alternative worlds (as in Left Hand of Darkness), and she approaches Lavinia’s world, from which Western civilization took its course, as unique and strange as any fantasy. It’s a novel that deserves to be ranked with Robert Graves’s I, Claudius.”

Video: Ursula K. Le Guin at Powell’s Bookstore

Ursula K. Le Guin told the Kirkus interviewer:

“In the Aeneid, Lavinia is a mere convention, the blond maiden, a
background figure barely sketched. Yet this is the woman the hero is
commanded by the gods to marry. She so evidently has a voice, and
Vergil knew how to listen to women; but he didn’t have time to listen to
her. He’s in the war part of his story and has to get all the battles
fought. So all Lavinia gets to do is blush. I felt it was time she got
to tell her view of things. Inevitably this is also an interpretation of the hero’s story, in which I
think Vergil shows the price of public triumph as personal tragedy.

“The first time I really read the Aeneid was in my seventies, when I got
enough Latin into my head at last to read it in Latin. Vergil is truly
untranslatable; his poetry is the music of his language, and it gets
lost in any other. Reading it at last, hearing that incredible voice,
was a tremendous joy. And Lavinia’s voice and her story came to me out
of that joy. A gift from a great giver.”

“Ursula K. Le Guin began her research for her new book, Lavinia, by reading Virgil’s epic poem The Aeneid in the original Latin. ‘Very, very slowly,’ she said in an interview. ‘Ten lines a day.’” [continued offsite]

About the Book

Troy has fallen. Rome is a tiny village by the seven hills...
At the end of Vergil’s epic poem The Aeneid, the Trojan hero
Aeneas, following his destiny, is about to marry the Italian girl
Lavinia. But in the poem, she has played only the slightest part,
and has never spoken a word.

Daughter of a local king, Lavinia has lived in peace and freedom,
till suitors came seeking her hand, and a foreign fleet sailed up the
Tiber. Now her mother wants her to marry handsome, ambitious Turnus,
but strange omens, prophecies spoken by the voices of the sacred
trees and springs, foretell that she must marry a stranger. And that
she will be the cause of a bitter war. And that her husband will not
live long.

Lavinia is determined to follow her own destiny. And when she talks
with the spirit of the poet in the sacred grove, she begins to see
that destiny. So she gains her own voice, learning how to tell the
story Vergil left untold — her story, her life, and the love of her
life.

Excerpts

“I went to the salt beds by the mouth of the river, in the May of my nineteenth year, to get salt for the sacred meal. Tita and Maruna came with me, and my father sent an old house-slave and a boy with a donkey to carry the salt home. It’s only a few miles up the coast, but we made an overnight picnic of it, loading the poor little donkey with food, taking all day to get there, setting up camp on a grassy dune above the beaches of the river and the sea. The five of us had supper round the fire, and told stories and sang songs while the sun set in the sea and the May dusk turned blue and bluer. Then we slept under the seawind.” [continued offsite]